After a long e-mail conversation with one student of appropriate architectural styles to use in a project course I realised that his ending comment is spot on:
I think the course and it's literature are focused on large systems and seeing that we are new to this, especially with a new language in parallel, its difficult to not apply what we learn during the course.I have been too blind when I teach, and not even my professional experience helped me to identify the problem:
In my opinion the patterns covered in the book left me half way with the idea that most architectures could fit into a pattern, within its own right.
Most (all) literature about architecture teaches solutions for big systems.Is there a niche for information on how to architect small systems? Small in the sense of not having millions lines of code, or a large development team, or a long project. I know that the agile manifesto states that that one of twelve important principles are
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.But do a google search on "agile architecture emerge" and see what comes up, a lot of interesting reading that suggest that the issue is not that simple.
A lot of software systems are small, from a bittorrent client (the student project) to the software in the door control unit in a car, to a mobile app. And yet they would all benefit of having some though about what they must meet for non-functional needs that is addressed by a (simple) architecture. Should I write a book on architecting small systems? So that a team member is better prepared when he or she participates in a small project where the architecture "emerges"? You don't need to be an architect to benefit from doing thinking at an architectural "level".
